First time clearing deadmines

[nerfshot]

thanks all!

My team was a Pally, Shaman, priest, 2x mage. My Talents are pretty much non-planned and probably not as effieciant as they should be and my gear was 1g greens from the AH (I realized that at lvl 13 most of my guys still had open slots and some even had lvl 4 gear

I first tried DM at 18. I did well but wiped when a pat came at me from behind just before the cannon. I doubt I would have cleared the boss though as my user skills were still pretty rough. When the pat jumped me I realized i had no real way to reorganize myself and that any little non-planned event could wipe me. I used that to better tweak some of my macros and keybindings as well as set up polymorph focus/assist. I think the biggest thing I learned was that you really need to make your pally a seperate piece. The 3 DPS should FF on a target but the pally needs to be operated like a full on toon rather than someone who just stands and dps macros. Cast bars and setting up views to see who my group targets are on my primary screen really helped me 'forget' about the dps guys and worry more on aggro and target control. Note: my priest did no DPS. I wanted her in reserve for only healing. I didnt want to not have mana when I needed it because she had a dPS rotation.

With lessons learned I went over South East were the hue camps on knolls are. I worked on my multitarget skills and quickly got to 20 with little effort.

Went back into DM at lvl20 team average and while it was slow and deliberate (I looted every corpse so evryone completed the gather quests) I had little problems. Another big thing I learned was keeping your DPS out of AOE range. Those fire AOE elites did a number on my a few times. The 'END' key (moving your slaves backward) was a great boon.

I used no totems until Van Cleef. For that fight I sat for a second and got a strategy moved my healer to one flank and my dps to another. Buffed, droped totems and shielded the pally. I had to burn a few pally cooldowns (lay hands) but by then I was ok with knowing that my dps guy were casting and my healing was on a constant full heal cycle so I was free to just play the pally. He dropped and no one died. It was a great practice. I may go back in and see if I can aggro multi targets better and lesson the time it takes to clear. This run took just under 90min.

My primary issue was in targeting. I am not sure if it is my macro or my latency but when I hit tab to slave assist me there is a delay and many times I have to hit is 2-3 times to get everyone assisting me. This is a real bother and I need t solve it before I move on. I am using /assist with conditions rather than a focus as I need my mages to be able to CC focus their polymorphs.

edit: here is the assist macro I am using. Again, not sure if I have system latency or what but it takes a few mashes to get everyone assisting me.
/assist [target=Pally, nodead, help, exists]; [target=Shaman, nodead, help, exists]; [target=mage1, nodead, help, exists]; [target=mage2, nodead, help, exists]; [target=priest, exists]
/petattack
/script SetView(2);